Yes, a café on Instagram and Google Maps still needs its own website

Yes. Instagram and your Google Maps pin do their jobs, one shows the room and the light through the window at nine in the morning, the other tells somebody two streets away that you're open, and neither reaches the person standing there with their phone out who doesn't know your café exists. That person searches Google, opens a website, and walks in. Right now the website they open isn't yours.

Why your own site finds new customers

Search and AI read the open web. Google, ChatGPT and Claude fetch pages at addresses like yourcafe.co.uk. A social profile inside an app is mostly not something they can fetch. If the only description of your café out there is a caption under a photo, that's the version anything reading about you has to work from.

With a site of your own you own the exact words people type. Brunch. Oat milk as standard. Dog friendly. Somewhere to sit with a laptop on a Tuesday morning. The beans you pull and who roasts them. Each of those can be a page written in the language of the person searching for it, and it stays there. Instagram is a feed you scroll past, and the post about your new menu is gone by next week. A page answers the question at the moment somebody asks it.

Which is a different sort of visitor from a follower. Someone searching for brunch near you at half nine on a Sunday has already decided they're going out for breakfast. They're picking the place, and they'll pick it off whatever page tells them the most: what's on the menu this month, what it costs, whether the two of them will get a table without booking. That's a decision made in a minute or two on a phone, and the café that answers those three things wins it more often than the café with the nicer grid.

How we make it simple

We build from your Google Business Profile. The hours, the phone number, the address, the photos and the reviews Google is already showing become the site's foundation, so your bank holiday hours can't be right in one place and wrong in another.

From the listing and your menu we make a page for the things you sell, and an FAQ out of the questions your reviews keep raising: whether there's wifi, whether you take dogs, whether there's room for a buggy, what time the kitchen stops doing eggs. If there's a page you want for the laptop crowd or for Sunday mornings with a pram, that's the kind of page a site of your own can carry.

The technical work you'd otherwise pay an SEO person for is included. The site is written to be indexed by Google and read by ChatGPT: pages of real text, structured data describing the café, a sitemap, and the lot submitted to Google and Bing when it goes live. Google can show a page at your address, under your café's name, and that page is about one café.

You give us the name and a way to reach you, and we're back in touch within one working day with the first version. No brief to fill in, nothing to write beforehand. After that, when your hours change for a bank holiday, you send us one message and we update the site for you.

How they work together

Maps carries on putting you on the map. The difference is that the Website button on your listing now has somewhere to go, so the person who found you on the map lands on your menu instead of a login screen for somebody else's app, and the pin does the job it was designed to do.

Instagram carries on being Instagram: the daily photo, the new cake, the people who already love the place. Point the bio link at your site and those followers arrive somewhere you control, where the menu is a page rather than a photo of a chalkboard from March. Both of them feed one thing that belongs to you, rather than sending everybody off in different directions.

If you take bookings for a table or run a coffee subscription, the link for it sits behind a button on the site and works exactly as it does today. Nothing you already use has to be replaced.

All your orders in one place

Plenty of cafés sell through the delivery apps, and keeping every menu right is the part nobody likes. Change a price or mark a dish sold out once with Rowbo and we update it on each app you sell on, and on your own site. The orders from those apps arrive on the same screen as everything else.

The orders you take yourself go there too. Collection, your own delivery, or ordering from the table on a packed Saturday: the customer orders and pays on your site, the order rings on your screen and reaches you by email as a kitchen ticket, and the card money goes into your own Stripe account. Card payments cost Stripe's standard 1.5% + 20p (checked 6 October 2026) and we take nothing on top, and ordering starts at £50 a month per location.

Keep the apps. However somebody orders, it lands in one place, from one menu.

What you pay

The website is £30 a month: a real multi-page site, the menu and the room and the hours, built from your Google listing and sitting on your own .co.uk or .com, with hosting and updates in the price. Cancel any month and keep the domain. Work it back and it's one extra customer a week. If you want ordering, the plans start at £50 a month with the website included, then £149, with Bespoke from £349 for customer tools and hands-on help.

Put your café's name into our café page and we'll build one from your Google listing. Read it through, then decide.